Welcome to The 'Book Beat

is a university
administrator living "across the pond" in the north east of England.
He's been a regular visitor to Low End Mac for many years and
attributes his passion for the Mac to LEM.

He says, "Whilst wondering whether or not to 'switch', I spent a lot
of time reading the site. Eventually I bought a £20 SE/30 off
eBay and was converted. Within a month I'd bought an iBook G4, which became my main machine. Since
then I've added an LC 475, a
PowerBook 5300, and a Powerbook 520 to the collection."

His main machine is a Dual 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5, but
Paul considers the SE/30 "one of the most amazingly well designed
pieces of computer equipment ever created". His SE/30 is "maxed out"
with 128 MB of RAM, and he can switch between a network card and a
color video PDS card. He has even had Mac OS 8.0 running on it, and has
plans to get A/UX on there soon.

His student years away from parents and supporting himself taught
Paul plenty about budgeting and frugality. "Okay, so the dual processor
G5 was a bit of a treat, but that aside I try my utmost to get the most
from my money. I'm very strongly into recycling, and am beginning to
build up something of a bookshelf on life in a post-oil society."

Hands-on with an iBook leads to
on-the-spot conversion, 2006.04.26. After years with Windows, the
Mac OS provided a mixture of awe at the graphics, surprise that Office
runs, amazement that it works so easily with digicams and third-party
monitors, and disbelief about the lack of malware.